Why would my Infinity foot pedal die after being plugged into a USB hub with other low-power peripherals?

I was using a USB-powered Infinity foot pedal with my Dell Inspiron laptop (which was about 5 years old at the time). The pedal worked fine for at least a year when plugged into its own USB port. Then I installed a multiport hub (not a cheap one, either) and plugged in my Logitech mouse transmitter, keyboard, and the foot pedal. All was well for a few hours, then the pedal started failing intermittently. It got worse, there were repeated messages about disconnecting and reconnecting, so I switched the connections around, restarted, switched connections, restarted. It seemed like the hub itself

Question by JTech on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.